[4.9 PATCH, alpha]: Switch alpha to LRA

[Jeff Law]

On 04/22/2013 11:17 AM, Uros Bizjak wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Richard Henderson <rth@redhat.com> wrote:
>> On 01/28/2013 03:14 PM, Uros Bizjak wrote:
>>>
>>> 2013-01-28  Uros Bizjak<ubizjak@gmail.com>
>>>
>>>          * config/alpha/alpha.c (TARGET_LRA_P): New define.
>>>
>>> Bootstrapped and regression tested [1] on alphaev68-unknown-linux-gnu.
>>>
>>> OK for 4.9?
>>>
>>
>> Yep.
>
> Unfortunately, alphas are much more tied to reload than it was hoped.
> While latest alphas (with FIX and BWX ISAs) survived transition to LRA
> without problems, further testing on ev4 and ev5 triggered various
> problems, one of them is PR57032 [1] that exposed rather unique way of
> handling aligned/nonaligned memory operands.
>
> The patch was reverted.
>
> I suspect that fixing older alphas to live with LRA would be quite
> involved task, and I guess nobody (including me) wants to spend
> considerable amount of time on a dying architecture. Consequently,
> this also means that alphas will die together with reload as far as
> gcc is concerned.
>
> [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=57032
Would it make sense to deprecate the older Alpha implementations without 
killing the "modern" ones?

jeff